A Memorial to the Enslaved People Who Enabled the Founding of Harvard Law School

On a clear, windy afternoon in early September at the opening of its bicentennial observance, Harvard Law School unveiled a memorial on campus. The plaque, affixed to a large stone, reads:

In honor of the enslaved whose labor created wealth that made possible the founding of Harvard Law School

May we pursue the highest ideals of law and justice in their memory

Harvard Law School was founded in 1817, with a bequest from Isaac Royall Jr. Royall’s wealth was derived from the labor of enslaved people on a sugar plantation he owned on the island of Antigua and on farms he owned in Massachusetts.

“We have placed this memorial here, in the campus cross-roads, at the center of the school, where everyone travels, where it cannot be missed,” said HLS Dean John Manning ’85. …

Harvard University President Drew Faust… also spoke at the unveiling, which followed a lecture focused on the complicated early history of the school.

“How fitting that you should begin your bicentennial,” said Faust, “with this ceremony reminding us that the path toward justice is neither smooth nor straight.” …

Halley, holder of the Royall Professorship of Law, who has spoken frequently about the Royall legacy, read aloud the names of enslaved men, women, and children of the Royall household from records that have survived, “so that we can all share together the shock of the sheer number, she said, “and a brief shared experience of their loss.”

“These names are the tattered, ruined remains, the accidents of recording and the encrustation of a system that sought to convert human beings into property,’ she said “But they’re our tattered remains.”

This commemorative issue also contains an interview with ImeIme Umana, Harvard Law Review’s 131st president, “How Have Harvard Scholars Shaped the Law?”:

How has legal scholarship changed since the Law Review began publishing more than a century ago?

Scholarship certainly has changed over time, and these pieces, whether or not they acknowledge it to a great extent, are consistent with the changing nature of the legal field in that they bring more voices to the table and more diverse perspectives. If you look back at our older scholarship, you’ll tend to see more traditional, doctrinal, technical pieces. now, they’re more aspirational, more critical, and have more social commentary in them. It’s a distinction between writing on what the law is and writing on what the law should be, and asking why things are the way they are.

I’m really passionate about the sate of the criminal legal system and civil rights. The cherry on top within those topics is scholarship that proposes new ways of thinking or challenges the status quo.

One of my favorite articles is [Assistant] Professor Andrew Crespo’s “Systemic Facts” [published in the June 2016 Harvard Law Review], because it does just that. The thesis is that courts are institutionally positioned to bring about systemic change, and that they can use their position to collect facts that they are institutionally privy to. It calls on them to do that such that we might learn more about how the legal system is structured.

The Law Review was founded 130 years ago, and now you are its president. Do you ever get caught up in thinking about the historical implications of running such a well-known and influential publication?

… Looking at it through a historical lens, the diversity of the student body and Law Review editors and authors is especially meaningful, as it makes legal institutions more inclusive, and therefore the law more inclusive. It’s important to keep pushing in that direction and never become complacent. The history is very important.

You are the first black woman who was elected to serve as president of the Law Review. Why do you think it took so long for that to happen?

Ive thought about it a lot and I just don’t know the answer. My thought is that it just tracks the lack of inclusion of black women in legal institutions, full stop. It’s a function of that. There’ always more we can be doing to be more inclusive. The slowness of milestones like this might have a broader cause than just something specific to the Law Review.

It probably tracks closer to the inclusion of Nigerian women at Harvard than black women. Umana is Nigerian American, and Nigerian Americans score significantly better on the SAT and LSAT than African Americans. (Based on average incomes, Nigerian Americans do better than white Americans, too.) So I’m going to go out on a limb and wager that significant black firsts at HLR are due to the arrival of more Nigerian and Kenyan immigrants, rather than the integration of America’s African American community.

While reading about ImeIme Umana, I noticed that American publications–such as NBC News–describe her as a “native” of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. By contrast, Financial Nigeria proudly claims her as a “Nigerian American”:

Born to Nigerian immigrant parents originally from Akwa Ibom State in Nigeria, Umana is a resident of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, United States. Umana graduated with a BA in Joint Concentration in African American Studies and Government from Harvard University in 2014. She is currently working on a Doctor of Law degree (Class of 2018) at the Harvard Law School.

Who is this man? HLS Class of 1926

The issue is full of fascinating older photographs with minimalist captions, because the graphic design team prefers white space over information.

For example, on page 58 is a photo of a collection of students and older men (is that Judge Learned Hand in the first row?) captioned simply 1926 and “Stepping up: by 1925, lawyers could pursue graduate degrees (LL.M.s and S.J.D.s) at HLS.

<- Seated in the front row is this man. Who is he? Quick perusal of a list of famous Indians reveals only that he isn’t any of them.

There is also an Asian man seated directly behind him whose photo I’ll post below. You might think, in our diversity obsessed age, when we track the first black editor of this and first black female head of that, someone would be curious enough about these men to tell us their stories. Who were they? How did they get to Harvard Law?

After some searching and help from @prius_1995, I think the Indian man is Dr. Kashi Narayan Malaviya, S.J.D. HLS 1926, and the Asian man is Domingo Tiongco Zavalla, LL.M. 1927, from the Philippines. (If you are curious, here are the relevant class lists.)

In Allahabad, during a meeting attended by Uma Nehru, Hriday Nath Kunzru and Dr. Kashi Narayan Malaviya, M. K. Acharya made the link between the politics of the nation and the plight of Hinduism very clear…

Domingo Tiongco Zavalla, LL.M. HLS 1927

(Unfortunately, it appears that he has a more famous relative named Madan Mohan Malaviya, who is coming up in the search results. His great-grandson is single, however, if any of you ladies are looking for a Brahmin husband.)

Politico recently ran an article titled “What if you could get your own immigrant?” which was so terrible, I don’t even know where to begin. (Even they now realize their headline was atrocious, so they changed it to “Sponsor an immigrant yourself”.)

Politico wants to know: why do only corporations get to sponsor immigrants? Why not individuals? What’s so good about companies that they get special rights that we mere plebian humans don’t? That’s not a terrible question, but then they rip off the mask of decency and show their complete misunderstanding of, well, everything:

Right now, special classes of citizens—mostly corporations (and in practice, big corporations) and family members—can sponsor temporary or permanent migrants, benefiting shareholders mainly, as well as ethnic enclaves.

This system should be wiped away and replaced with a system of citizenship sponsorship for immigrants that we call a Visas Between Individuals Program. Under this new system, all citizens would have the right to sponsor a migrant for economic purposes.

Here’s how the program would work: Imagine a woman named Mary Turner, who lives in Wheeling, West Virginia. She was recently laid off from a chicken-processing plant and makes ends meet by walking and taking care of her neighbors’ pets. Mary could expand her little business by hiring some workers, but no one in the area would accept a wage she can afford. Mary goes online—to a new kind of international gig economy website, a Fiverr for immigrants—and applies to sponsor a migrant. She enters information about what she needs: someone with rudimentary English skills, no criminal record and an affection for animals. She offers a room in her basement, meals and $5 an hour. (Sponsors under this program would be exempt from paying minimum wage.) The website offers Mary some matches—people living in foreign countries who would like to spend some time in the United States and earn some money. After some back and forth, Mary interviews a woman named Sofia who lives in Paraguay.

In no particular order:

1. Mary is not an “individual” in this scenario, she is a small business owner looking to hire employees, so we are right back at square one: a company hiring immigrants. Now, maybe Mary hasn’t filed all of the paperwork to become a proper corporation–in which case she is running tremendous legal risks.

Look, corporations don’t exist because someone needed to split the cost of a big building. They exist to minimize the legal risks to individuals from running a business.

Corporations enjoy what is called “limited liability.” This means that while a corporation can be sued for all it is worth, the corporation’s owners get to keep whatever money they have in their personal bank accounts. If Donald Trump’s hotels get sued for, say, hiring discrimination, they can go bankrupt, go out of business, and get converted into very tall waterslides by a new round of developers, but the money in Donald Trump’s personal wallet is untouchable. (Which is why Trump is still wealthy after numerous bankruptcies.)

If Mary is just an individual and not a corporation, she bears personal liability for anything she or her employees do. For example, if a client’s prize-winning akita chokes on a chew toy and dies while at doggy daycare, she can be personally sued for the full $15,000 her clients paid for the pooch. If Sophia crashes the company car while on the way to a client’s house to pick up a dog, totaling another car in the process and putting a four year old girl in the hospital with crushed femurs and a punctured lung, Mary will be sued for every last penny while Sophia skips bail and hightails it out of the country.

In other words, once your small business is at the point where you are looking to hire employees and wondering how to do payroll taxes, you should be filling out that incorporation paperwork for your own benefit. “What if we let people who haven’t incorporated their small businesses and so face a lot more legal risks personally sponsor immigrants for economic gain?” is not good logic.

Yeah, after the chicken processing plant laid off all of its workers, apparently Mary’s neighbors discovered that they had tons of cash lying round just waiting to be spent on luxuries for their pets.

(Clarification for the stupid: normal West Virginians either walk their own dogs or just let them poop in the backyard. Professional dog-walkers are a New York thing, where urbanites assuage their guilt about leaving their surrogate children alone in tiny apartments for 14 hours a day while they file biglaw briefs by hiring other people to actually care for them.)

3. Mary is already barely making ends meet at an extremely low-income job that not many of her neighbors need done with zero barriers to entry, and her idea for making more money is to find someone who can live on even less income than herself? Is Sophia expected to eat in this scenario? Don’t forget that you now have to keep track of payroll taxes and deductions–most businesses hire a payroll service to do this for them, because legal compliance is tricky and doing it incorrectly can get you into very expensive trouble with the IRS.

4. If Sophia can make enough to live on, why would she give Mary any of the money? It’s not like dog walking is a complicated business that requires a professional to handle all of the client information. Sophia can just negotiate with the clients herself and give Mary nothing.

Tags used to mark hired slaves in South Carolina, evoke

5. Oh, wait, Sophia lives in Mary’s basement and is required to give Mary the money she makes? We have a word for that: SLAVERY.

No, really, that actually happened under slavery. People who didn’t have slaves or needed a worker with a particular skill that a slave happened to have would hire slaves from the people who had them. The slaves received a certain amount of wages, most of which went to the owner but a certain percent of which went to the slaves themselves, who could save up money for pleasant things like new clothes or freedom.

Here’s a quote from the article:

According to our calculations, a typical family of four could boost its income by $10,000 to 20,000 by hosting migrants. The reason is that migrants to the United States usually increase their wages many times, allowing them to pay as much as $6,000 to hosts for sponsorships (and our average family could sponsor up to four visas, one for each member).

Where exactly are these four extra people sleeping in a household of four? The sofa?

Most slaves who worked for South Carolina College were “hired” on a short-term basis. Hiring out, or hiring, referred to a system in which a hirer would temporarily lease a slave from an owner. In doing so, owners generated revenue from their slaves’ labor without having an investment in the actual work itself. Slaves were more likely to face weekly, monthly, or yearly hiring than being permanently sold. Each year, five to fifteen percent of the slave population was hired for outside work. Conversely, less than four percent of slaves permanently exchanged hands. Hired slaves performed all kinds of labor: women worked domestic jobs such as laundering and wet-nursing, while men labored on roads, canals, and railroads. Others worked in industries such as mining coal, smelting iron, and processing tobacco. Skilled slaves might work as carpenters or blacksmiths. The number of hired slaves and the variety of jobs reflected not only the flexibility of slavery but also the importance of slaves as capital for owners and hirers.

6. You economists should realize that under a scenario like this, with unlimited visa supply, the equilibrium price of visas will drop to the cost of the visa and families will make nothing.

7. No minimum wage, but only for the immigrants. Sure, let’s just make Americans unemployable.

Look, I understand if you want to do away with the minimum wage for everyone. There are coherent arguments you could make in favor of letting everyone work for whatever wage they can get and letting the market work it out. But this is legally creating two classes of people in which one group is more expensive to hire than the other–which obviates the entire point of having minimum wage laws and just doesn’t work.

8. There used to be a group of Americans who could be hired for slightly below minimum wage for small jobs: teenagers.

Teenagers mowed lawns, babysat, walked dogs, even picked fruit and flipped burgers. We still have teenagers in West Virginia who can walk and groom dogs–even 10 year olds can probably be convinced to walk dogs for a dollar a dog per hour. Teenagers also have the benefit of having low living expenses because they still live with their parents, and the work experience they acquire in their highschool years can translate into a sense of accomplishment, real jobs, and eventually, allow them to pay for real expenses. There is no sensible reason to import people from the third world to do the same job Mary’s 13 year old neighbor could do equally well, unless you just hate children.

The elimination of jobs teenagers traditionally did (through the influx of low-wage immigrants who end up doing the jobs instead,) means that modern teens no longer get that early experience with working, sense of accomplishment, and gradual transition to productive, working life. Instead, they graduate from college with no work experience and start looking for jobs that require 3-5 years of previous experience in the field.

9. The article seems to think that American society is some kind of bottomless money pit that can keep growing if we just put more poor people at the bottom. There’s a technical term for this: pyramid scheme.

“We can get richer if we just find more poor people to exploit” is not a long-term economic policy. It’s more like someone read Marx and thought “Wow, extracting Surplus Value from the proleteriat sounds awesome!”

10. You might be thinking, “What if people just want to hire someone to be their personal servant?”

As the article notes, that’s already a thing. If you need a gardener, chef, maid, or live-in nanny, you can already find plenty of hireable people (immigrants included) to do these jobs–and these are not jobs that ordinary, working-class Americans are hiring anyone to do.

11. Enforcement. Say what you will for Google, at least I don’t have to worry about it keeping H1-Bs chained up in its basement, feeding them nothing but table scraps in between coding projects.

I have much less confidence in the sorts of people who think it would be a good idea to have 4 immigrants sleeping in their basements in order to reap their visa fees. In fact, in think these people will strongly resemble the sorts of people who take in foster kids for the fees, adopt orphans to get another pair of working hands, and generally thought indentured servitude was a great idea.

And who is going to pay federal agents to comb people’s basements in search of immigrant mistreatment? Me.

However, the article suggests that the primary reason abuses won’t happen is that if people like Sofia don’t like their treatment, they’ll just use their extensive savings to buy an international plane ticket and hop back home.

The horrific old village of Hollókő, Nógrád, Hungary (UNESCO World Heritage Site)

12.Sofia, who grew up in a village, has endured hardships that few Americans can imagine.

A village. A VILLAGE, I TELL YOU. You cannot imagine the horrors of growing up in a a clustered human settlement or community, larger than a hamlet but smaller than a town, with a population ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand.

I mean, just look at this Hungarian village:

Traumatic.

Overall, I don’t think the author was totally crazy when he thought, “Hey, why do corporations get special rights that individuals don’t? Why let corporations pick immigrants and not ordinary people?” I, too, am uncomfortable with the idea of corporations having special rights. But trying to preserve the part of immigration that is based on “hiring people to do jobs” while doing away with the part where corporations are doing the hiring is missing the point of what corporations are: organizations that we route hiring through. The logic here is thus completely garbled.

But garbled logic aside, there is a much deeper problem. I’ve been saying for a long time that the demand for low-wage immigrants skirts perilously close to the logic behind slavery. “Americans are too good for these icky jobs; let’s import some brown people and make them do it.” This article strips away all pretense of valuing immigrants for their skills, perspectives, or can-do spirit: they are nothing but mobile economic units, cogs in an increasingly post-industrial machine.

Princeton University [has] a new public-art project that confronts the school’s participation in the nation’s early sins. On Monday, the university unveiled Impressions of Liberty, by the African American artist Titus Kaphar. The sculpture is the conceptual core of a campus-wide initiative that begins this fall and aims to reconcile the university’s ties to slavery. The Princeton and Slavery Project’s website has released hundreds of articles and primary documents about slavery and racism at Princeton…

I’m old enough to remember when George Washington was admired for freeing all of his slaves in an era when most people took slavery for granted. Today he is castigated for not having sprung from the womb with a fully modern set of moral opinions.

Impressions of Liberty, by Titus Kaphar

Impressions of Liberty is Kaphar’s portrait of Samuel Finley–fifth president and one of the original trustees of Princeton (1761-1766)–interwoven with photographs of black actors in historical dress etched in glass.

For generations, slave-owning Christians—including Princeton’s founders—used religious ideas to justify a horrific national practice, [Kaphar] noted; Finley is holding a bible in Impressions of Liberty.

Note the framing: yes, Christians used religion to justify owning slaves. So did Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, pagans, and atheists. There’s nothing unique about Christians and slavery aside from the fact that Finley was Christian. No mention is made of pagan Africans who captured and sold each other into slavery, nor of Muslims who raided Africa and Europe in search of slaves. There were Jewish slave merchants and Confederates, as well, for slavery was a near-universal practice justified by people all over the world prior to its abolition by whites in the 1800s. The article mentions none of that; only Christians are singled out for criticism.

The article doesn’t say how much Princeton paid for the sculpture it commissioned to castigate the memory of one of its founders. The work currently stands outside MacLean House, but will soon be moved indoors, to Princeton’s permanent art collection. MacLean House–completed in 1756–is a national landmark that was home to Princeton’s first presidents, including Samuel Finley. It also housed George Washington during the Battle of Princeton.

According to the article:

On the one hand, according to records, Princeton was a bastion of liberty, educating numerous Revolutionary War leaders and in 1783 hosting the Continental Congress… At the same time, Sandweiss found that the institution’s first nine presidents all owned slaves at some point, as did the school’s early trustees. She also discovered that the school enrolled a significant number of anti-abolitionist, Southern students during its early years; an alumni delivered a pro-slavery address at the school’s 1850 commencement ceremony. …

Princeton’s racist history enabled it to provide social and political benefits for alumni—an advantage that students will continue to enjoy well into the future.

While I happen to think that universities have it much too good these days and deserve to be taken down a notch, I find this claim extremely dubious. Harvard and Yale are located in staunchly abolitionist New England and had very few ties to slavery, (Mr. Yale apparently knew a guy who had slaves, and Harvard Law School received some money from a guy who had slaves,) yet these schools are arguably even wealthier and more powerful than closer-to-the-South and more-tied-to-slavery Princeton. Stanford was founded after slavery was outlawed, and yet its students enjoy social and political benefits on par with Princeton’s.

We could argue that the entire area of the Confederacy reaped the economic benefits of slavery, yet today this region is much poorer than the Free States of the North. There isn’t just no correlation between slavery, wealth, and power–there’s actually a negative correlation. Slavery, if it has any effect at all, makes a region poorer and weaker.

… Princeton University is spreading the mission across various pieces of art through a show this fall entitled “Making History Visible: Of American Myths And National Heroes.” At the exhibit’s entrance, viewers begin with Kaphar’s pieceMonumental Inversion: George Washington—a sculpture of the leader astride his horse, made out of wood, blown glass, and steel. The sculpture depicts the former president’s dueling nature: He’s glorified within a great American equestrian monument but he’s also sitting astride a charred cavity, surrounded by glass on the ground. In juxtaposing Kaphar’s artwork and a George Washington plaster bust, “Making History Visible” forces visitors, hopefully, to see and feel the contradiction in colonial leaders who sought freedom from tyranny but did not extend that ideal to slaves.

I repeat: George Washington freed all of his slaves.

We might question the point of all this. Kaphar is free to make his art, of course. His paintings display quite excellent technical skill, I admit. But why do we, as a society, feel the need to commission and display attacks on our founders? Princeton’s students could just as happily go to class each day without looking at images of Finley’s slaves; unlike Washington, Finley isn’t famous and most students were probably blissfully unaware of his slaveholding until someone decided to stick a sculpture dedicated to it on the lawn.

How do Princeton’s black students feel after walking past a sculpture depicting slaves? Uplifted? Happy? Ready to go to class and concentrate on their lectures? I doubt it. Art may be “powerful” or “open dialogues,” but no one seems to feel better after viewing such pieces.

No, I don’t see how this selective dwelling on the past improves anything.

A world in which images of your founders and heroes are defaced, their corpses judged and rusty nails are driven into their portraits: it’s like a cruel dystopia, Lewis’s That Hideous Strength or 1984. According to Wikipedia:

During and after the October Revolution, widespread destruction of religious and secular imagery took place, as well as the destruction of imagery related to the Imperial family. The Revolution was accompanied by destruction of monuments of past tsars, as well as the destruction of imperial eagles at various locations throughout Russia. According to Christopher Wharton, “In front of a Moscow cathedral, crowds cheered as the enormous statue of Tsar Alexander III was bound with ropes and gradually beaten to the ground. After a considerable amount of time, the statue was decapitated and its remaining parts were broken into rubble”.[40]

You know, they tell us, “No one is attacking George Washington; that’s just a crazy right-wing conspiracy theory,” and then they go and do it.

Incidentally, Georgetown, according to the article, “announced last year that it would grant admissions preference to descendants of slaves whose sale it profited from in the early 1800s.” How do you qualify for that? Do you have to prove that you’re descended from the specific slaves involved, or can you be descended from any American slaves? Because I had ancestors who were enslaved, too, and I’d like to get in on this racket.

In the end, the article answers its titular question:

When Impressions of Liberty is removed from Maclean House in December and enters Princeton’s permanent museum collection, its greatest achievement may lie in the realization that no apology or recompense can ever suffice. …

It was commonly believed that a mixture of Creek and Negro blood was a dangerous cross, and that the offspring of such a union was sure to be ‘mean.’ It was true enough in the case of Lukey Davis, but there would seem to be little reason to accept it as generally so. For several hundred years there had been a strong infiltration of Negro blood into the Creek tribe, more so than with the Cherokee, Choctaw and Chickasaw. Few Creeks were a hundred per cent Indian. Undoubtedly intermarriage had some effect on Creek culture. That it worked any tribal character change or was responsible for the inflamed criminal instincts of some Creeks, such as those with whom Rufus Buck surrounded himself, must be dismissed as absurd.

Members of the Creek (Muscogee) Nation in OK around 1877. They included men of mixed Creek, European and African ancestry.

EvX: These are two interesting claims: first, that Creeks are heavily mixed, and second, that some people believe this an inauspicious mix. (Our author makes numerous statements throughout the book to the effect of not believing that criminality runs in families.)

This leads us to a modern-day controversy:

The Creek (aka the Muscogee,) were known as one of the “5 Civilized Tribes,” along with the Seminole, Cherokee, Choctaw and Chickasaw, for their high level of cultural sophistication and swift adoption of European technology. The five tribes are descended from the Mississippi Mound Builders Culture whose cities and towns once dotted the south east, before European diseases and Spanish-horse-mounted raiders from the Great Plains brought it down. And like their European neighbors in Georgia, they had slaves:

After the [Revolutionary] war ended in 1783, the Muscogee learned that Britain had ceded their lands to the now independent United States. … Alexander McGillivray led pan-Indian resistance to white encroachment, receiving arms from the Spanish in Florida to fight trespassers. The bilingual and bicultural McGillivray worked to create a sense of Muscogee nationalism and centralize political authority, struggling against village leaders who individually sold land to the United States. He also became a wealthy landowner and merchant, owning as many as sixty black slaves. …

In the summer of 1790, McGillivray and 29 other Muscogee chiefs signed the Treaty of New York, on behalf of the ‘Upper, Middle and Lower Creek and Seminole composing the Creek nation of Indians,’ ceding a large portion of their lands to the federal government and promising to return fugitive slaves, in return for federal recognition of Muscogee sovereignty and promises to evict white settlers. …

In 1805, the Lower Creeks ceded their lands east of the Ocmulgee to Georgia… A number of Muscogee chiefs acquired slaves and created cotton plantations, grist mills and businesses along the Federal Road.

The Seminole tribe fused about this time in Florida from a combination of Creeks, various other local tribes, and runaway slaves:

Led by Chief Secoffee (Cowkeeper), they became the center of a new tribal confederacy, the Seminole, which grew to include earlier refugees from the Yamasee War, remnants of the ‘mission Indians,’ and escaped African slaves.[20]…

Many Muscogee refused to surrender and escaped to Florida. They allied with other remnant tribes, becoming the Seminole. Muscogee were later involved on both sides of the Seminole Wars in Florida. …

The Red Stick refugees who arrived in Florida after the Creek War tripled the Seminole population, and strengthened the tribe’s Muscogee characteristics.[34] …

The Seminole continued to welcome fugitive black slaves and raid American settlers, leading the U.S. to declare war in 1817. … In 1823, a delegation of Seminole chiefs met with the new U.S. governor of Florida, expressing their opposition to proposals that would reunite them with the Upper and Lower Creek, partly because the latter tribes intended to enslave the Black Seminole. Instead, the Seminole agreed to move onto a reservation in inland central Florida.

But enough about the Seminoles; let’s get back to the Creek who are called Creek:

Because many Muscogee Creek people did support the Confederacy during the Civil War, the US government required a new treaty with the nation in 1866 to define peace after the war. It required the Creek to emancipate their slaves and to admit them as full members and citizens of the Creek Nation, equal to the Creek in receiving annuities and land benefits. They were then known as Creek Freedmen. The US government required setting aside part of the Creek reservation land to be assigned to the freedmen. Many of the tribe resisted these changes. The loss of lands contributed to problems for the nation in the late 19th century.

So in 2001, the Creek tribal government changed the rules:

Creek Freedmen is a term for emancipated African Americans who were slaves of Muscogee Creek tribal members before 1866. … Freedmen who wished to stay in the Creek Nation in Indian Territory, with whom they often had blood relatives, were to be granted full citizenship in the Creek Nation. …

The term also includes their modern descendants in the United States. At the time of the war and since, many Creek Freedmen were of partial Creek descent by blood.[1] Registration of tribal members under the Dawes Commission often failed to record such ancestry. In 2001, the Creek Nation changed its membership rules, requiring all members to prove descent to persons listed as “Indian by Blood” on the Dawes Rolls. The Creek Freedmen have sued against this decision. …

Most of the Freedmen were former slaves of tribal members who had lived in both upper and lower Creek territories in the Southeast. In some villages, Creek citizens married enslaved men or women, and had mixed-race children with them. Interracial marriages were common during this time, and many Creek Freedmen were partly of Creek Indian ancestry. …

Beginning in 1898, the US officials created the Dawes Rolls to document the tribal members for [land] allotments; registrars quickly classified persons as “Indians by Blood”, “Freedmen,” or “Intermarried Whites.”…

The peace treaty of 1866 granted the Freedmen full citizenship and rights as Creek regardless of proportion of Creek or Indian ancestry. The Muscogee (Creek) Nation in 1979 reorganized the government and constitution based on the Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act of 1936. It changed its membership rules, requiring that members be descendants of persons listed as ‘Indians by Blood’ on the Dawes Rolls. They expelled Creek Freedmen descendants who could not prove descent from such persons, despite the 1866 treaty, asserting their sovereign right to determine citizenship.[3] Since the Creek changed their membership rules in 2001, they have excluded persons who cannot prove descent from persons listed on the Dawes Rolls as Indians by Blood.

An illustration of the Cahokia Mounds Site in Illinois, part of the Mound Builder Culture

Who belongs? For that matter, who has the authority to determine who belongs? Are you a real goth, or just a poser? A real American? A real Creek? It’s rather silly signalling when we’re talking about teenagers at the mall; it’s a significant question when “belonging” to a group entitles a person to significant benefits. Americans enjoy the benefits of protection by the American Armed Forces, welfare if we need it, and a free trade/free movement zone within the 50 states, for example. Creeks enjoy the benefits of scholarships, housing assistance, health care assistance, and of course culture and community.The Creek likely don’t regard treaties with the conquering US government as actually determining who is a “real” Creek–and money can be a strong incentive for tightening the membership rules.

Today, the Muscogee Nation operates a more than $106 million budget and has more than 2,400 employees. It has tribal facilities and programs across eight districts of the Muscogee Nation and serves more than 60,000 enrolled tribal members.

As for the second claim, that Creek-African mixes were likely to be unpleasant people, if there is any truth to it at all, it was most likely due to which Africans ended up in the Creek Nation and which particular Creeks they married. Many of the whites who crossed into Indian Territory and married into the various tribes seem to have been “difficult” people (often criminals) escaping the US legal system. The same may have been true for blacks who chose to move to Indian Territory, or were sold to the Creeks by white plantation owners. Overall, though, Creeks aren’t genetically that different from related tribes like the Cherokee, so there’s nothing exceptional about a black/Creek mix besides the individuals involved.

(The bread of slavery, they say, is far sweeter than the bread of freedom.)

And shelter

Children were born, safe from wolves, hunger, or cold

and you grew used to man.

Centuries passed

And it seemed you outnumbered the stars

Perhaps your sons disappeared

But was it worse than wolves?

You could almost forget you were once wild

Could you return to the mountains, even if you wanted to?

And as they lead you away

You ask

Did I ever have a choice?

To explain: The process of domestication is fascinating. Some animals, like wolves, began associating with humans because they could pick up our scraps. Others, like cats, began living in our cities because they liked eating the vermin we attracted. (You might say the mice, too, are domesticated.) These relationships are obviously mutually beneficial (aside from the mice.)

The animals we eat, though, have a different–more existential–story.

Humans increased the number of wild goats and sheep available for them to eat by eliminating competing predators, like wolves and lions. We brought them food in the winter, built them shelters to keep them warm in the winter, and led them to the best pastures. As a result, their numbers increased.

But, of course, we eat them.

From the goat’s perspective, is it worth it?

There’s a wonderful metaphor in the Bible, enacted every Passover: matzoh.

If you’ve never had it, matzoh tastes like saltines, only worse. It’s the bread of freedom, hastily thrown on the fire, hastily thrown on the fire and carried away.

The bread of slavery tastes delicious. The bread of freedom tastes awful.

1And they took their journey from Elim, and all the congregation of the children of Israel came unto the wilderness of Sin, which is between Elim and Sinai, on the fifteenth day of the second month after their departing out of the land of Egypt. 2And the whole congregation of the children of Israel murmured against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness: 3And the children of Israel said unto them, Would to God we had died by the hand of the LORD in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the flesh pots, and when we did eat bread to the full… Exodus 16

Even if the goats didn’t want to be domesticated, hated it and fought against it, did they have any choice? If the domesticated goats have more surviving children than wild ones, then goats will become domesticated. It’s a simple matter of numbers:

Alexandre Dumas, son of former slave Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, general in the French army

Welcome back to Anthropology Friday. Today we’re finishing Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States. (available on Amazon.) These stories were gathered in the 1930s as part of a Federally-funded program to get people working and preserve first-hand accounts of the history of the United States before everyone involved passed away.

When I start an anthropology text, I don’t know if I’m really going to enjoy it. Some texts are informative but dull, and many are both dull and uninformative. These personal narratives might not count as “anthropology” in the formal, polished sense–most of the interviewers probably had little to no formal “anthropology” training, and did very little to analyze or comment on the material they gathered.

Despite the obvious shortcomings of their methodology (interviewees sometimes seem to be inventing or exaggerating stories for the sake of the white interviewer,) and many short interviews with people who had little to say, the interviews still constitute nearly 10,000 pages of genuine first-hand accounts of slavery, the Civil War, and the late 1800s in the US South.

As someone who grew up in the South, much of this dovetails with my own cultural knowledge/memories. The tradition of eating black eyed peas for luck on New Years’ was at least mentioned, if not exactly observed (my grandmother probably still eats them.) For that matter, when my grandparents (who are still alive, if quite elderly) were young, back in the 30s, they heard first-hand accounts about the Civil War from their elderly relatives (long story short: Union troops burned down the farm.)

While every story is unique, they have certain commonalities, and many–especially the ones about the Yankees–are similar to the ones passed down in my own family.

Anyway, let’s begin.

“Aunt” Millie Bates: The Ghosts of War

“Was not long after dat fore de spooks wuz a gwine round ebber whar. When you would go out atter dark, somethin’ would start to a haintin’ ye. You would git so scairt dat you would mighty ni run every time you went out atter dark; even iffin you didn’t see nothin’. Chile, don’t axe me what I seed. Atter all dat killin’ and a burnin’ you know you wuz bliged to see things wid all dem spirits in distress a gwine all over de land. You see, it is like dis, when a man gits killed befo he is done what de good Lawd intended fer him to do, he comes back here and tries to find who done him wrong. I mean he don’ come back hisself, but de spirit, it is what comes and wanders around. Course, it can’t do nothin’, so it jus scares folks and haints dem.”

Maggie Black, 79 years old: Children’s Nurse, Games, and School

“Gawd been good to me, honey. I been heah uh long ole time en I can’ see mucha dese days, but I gettin’ ‘long sorta so-so. I wuz train up to be uh nu’se ‘oman en I betcha I got chillun more den any 60 year ole ’bout heah now dat I nu’se when dey wuz fust come heah. No, honey, ain’ got no chillun uv me own. Aw my chillun white lak yuh.”

EvX: As far as I know, the tradition of hiring black women to care for white children has disappeared from the South, (modern children are sent to daycares where they are raised by Hispanic women,) but memories of the system linger. Considering the South’s rather strict racial hierarchy, this was a kind of curious inversion. In practice, I wonder how it affected social relations. But continuing on:

“Us had plenty to eat in slavery time. It wasn’t de best but it filled us up and give us strength ‘nough to work. Marster would buy a years rations on de first of every year and when he git it, he would have some cooked and would set down and eat a meal of it. He would tell us it didn’t hurt him, so it won’t hurt us. Dats de kind of food us slaves had to eat all de year. Of course, us got a heap of vegetables and fruits in de summer season, but sich as dat didn’t do to work on, in de long summer days.”

EvX: Oh God, a year’s worth of rations purchased all at once. That sounds pretty unappetizing.

It appears that one of the questions on the questionnaire the interviewers used was about food, so there are a lot of responses on the subject. The vast majority of responses state that food in slavery times was simple but abundant. By contrast, post-slavery, many people experienced a great deal of hunger (especially since the war disrupted agriculture and the Yankees burned down a lot of food.) But continuing on:

“Marster had over twenty grown slaves all de time. He bought and sold them whenever he wanted to. It was sad times to see mother and chillun separated. I’s seen de slave speculator cut de little nigger chillun with keen leather whips, ’cause they’d cry and run after de wagon dat was takin’ their mammies away after they was sold.

“De overseer was poor white folks, if dats what you is askin’ ’bout, and dat is one thing dat made him so hard on de slaves of de plantation. All de overseers I knowed ’bout was poor white folks; they was white folks in de neighborhood dat wasn’t able to own slaves. All dis class of people was called by us niggers, poor white folks. …

“Most them there patrollers was poor white folks, I believes. Rich folks stay in their house at night, ‘less they has some sort of big frolic amongst theirselves. Poor white folks had to hustle ’round to make a living, so, they hired out theirselves to slave owners and rode de roads at night and whipped niggers if they ketched any off their plantation widout a pass.

EvX: Several interviewees mentioned that overseers/patrollers/KKK members were drawn largely from the class of “poor whites”–an ethnically distinct group of whites drawn from a combination of the English lower classes, “Scotch-Irish,” and probably some regular Irish.

Andy Brice, 81 years old: Fiddlin’ Fiddler and the Election of 1878:

“Howdy Cap’n! I come to Winnsboro dis mornin’ from way ‘cross Wateree, where I live now ‘mongst de bull-frogs and skeeters. Seem lak they just sing de whole night thru: ‘De bull-frog on de bank, and de skeeter in de pool.’ Then de skeeter sail ’round my face wid de tra la, la la la, la la la part of dat old song you is heard, maybe many times. …

“One day I see Marse Thomas a twistin’ de ears on a fiddle and rosinin’ de bow. Then he pull dat bow ‘cross de belly of dat fiddle. Sumpin’ bust loose in me and sing all thru my head and tingle in my fingers. I make up my mind, right then and dere, to save and buy me a fiddle. I got one dat Christmas, bless God! I learn and been playin’ de fiddle ever since. I pat one foot while I playin’. I kept on playin’ and pattin’ dat foot for thirty years. I lose dat foot in a smash up wid a highway accident but I play de old tunes on dat fiddle at night, dat foot seem to be dere at de end of dat leg (indicating) and pats just de same. Sometime I ketch myself lookin’ down to see if it have come back and jined itself up to dat leg, from de very charm of de music I makin’ wid de fiddle and de bow. …

“I ‘members very little ’bout de war, tho’ I was a good size boy when de Yankees come. By instint, a nigger can make up his mind pretty quick ’bout de creed of white folks, whether they am buckra or whether they am not. Every Yankee I see had de stamp of poor white trash on them. They strutted ’round, big Ike fashion, a bustin’ in rooms widout knockin’, talkin’ free to de white ladies, and familiar to de slave gals, ransackin’ drawers, and runnin’ deir bayonets into feather beds, and into de flower beds in de yards. …

“Ellen and me have one child, Sallie Ann. Ellen ‘joy herself; have a good time nussin’ white folks chillun. Nussed you; she tell me ’bout it many time. ‘Spect she mind you of it very often. I knows you couldn’t git ’round dat woman; nobody could. …

“You wants me to tell ’bout dat ‘lection day at Woodward, in 1878? You wants to know de beginnin’ and de end of it? Yes? Well, you couldn’t wet dis old man’s whistle wid a swallow of red liquor now? Couldn’t you or could you? Dis was de way of it: It was set for Tuesday. Monday I drive de four-hoss wagon down to dis very town. Marse John McCrory and Marse Ed Woodward come wid me. They was in a buggy. When us got here, us got twenty, sixteen shooters and put them under de hay us have in de wagon. Bar rooms was here. I had fetched my fiddle ‘long and played in Marse Fred Habernick’s bar ’til dinner time. Us leave town ’bout four o’clock. Roads was bad but us got home ’bout dark. Us put de guns in Marse Andy Mobley’s store. Marse Ed and me leave Marse John to sleep in de store and to take care of de guns.

“De nex’ mornin’, polls open in de little school house by de brick church. I was dere on time, help to fix de table by de window and set de ballot boxes on it. Voters could come to de window, put deir arms thru and tuck de vote in a slit in de boxes. Dere was two supervisors, Marse Thomas for de Democrats and Uncle Jordan for de Radicals. Marse Thomas had a book and a pencil, Uncle Jordan had de same.

“Joe Foster, big buckra nigger, want to vote a stranger. Marse Thomas challenge dis vote. In them times colored preachers so ‘furiate de women, dat they would put on breeches and vote de ‘Publican radical ticket. De stranger look lak a woman. Joe Foster ‘spute Marse Thomas’ word and Marse Thomas knock him down wid de naked fist. Marse Irish Billy Brice, when him see four or five hindred blacks crowdin’ ’round Marse Thomas, he jump thru de window from de inside. When he lit on de ground, pistol went off pow! One nigger drop in his tracks. Sixteen men come from nowhere and sixteen, sixteen shooters. Marse Thomas hold up his hand to them and say: ‘Wait!’ Him point to de niggers and say: ‘Git.’ They start to runnin’ ‘cross de railroad, over de hillside and never quit runnin’ ’til they git half a mile away. De only niggers left on dat ground was me, old Uncle Kantz, (you know de old mulatto, club-foot nigger) well, me and him and Albert Gladney, de hurt nigger dat was shot thru de neck was de only niggers left. Dr. Tom Douglas took de ball out Albert’s neck and de white folks put him in a wagon and sent him home. I drive de wagon.

When I got back, de white boys was in de graveyard gittin’ names off de tombstones to fill out de talley sheets, dere was so many votes in de box for de Hampton ticket, they had to vote de dead. I ‘spect dat was one resurrection day all over South Carolina.”

EvX: I believe this was the 1878 Gubernatorial election. Wikipedia says:

The 1878 South Carolina gubernatorial election was held on November 5, 1878 to select the governor of the state of South Carolina. Wade Hampton III was renominated by the Democrats and ran against no organized opposition in the general election to win reelection for a second two-year term. …

Upon becoming Governor after a prolonged struggle against Daniel Henry Chamberlain in the gubernatorial election of 1876, Wade Hampton adopted moderate racial policies and favored many Republican proposals. For instance, the state modified the agriculture lien law and passed a law giving counties the ability to mandate the fencing of livestock. Hampton also appointed many blacks to government positions and provided for more funds to be spent educating black children than white children. …

Throughout Hampton’s first term in office, he appealed for political harmony between the races. Hampton carried out his pledge to ensure equal rights between the races and he appointed more black men to office than Chamberlain had during his term as governor.[5] The more militant faction of the Democratic Party, led by Martin Gary, was entirely against any cooperation with blacks and instead sought to remove blacks completely from political life. The Edgefield County Democrats would not acknowledge any black Democratic clubs and they prevented blacks from participating in the primary elections. Hampton publicly refuted this policy and no other county followed suit.[4] Nevertheless, new laws were enacted by the General Assembly in 1877 to make it harder for blacks to participate and vote in the electoral process.

Hampton took every county in South Carolina, winning by an absurd 119,550 to 213 votes, or 99.8%.

Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee

George Briggs, 88: The Healing Preacher

“I is gwine over to Tosch to see Maria. Everybody know Maria. She go by Rice–Maria Rice. She sont fer me to cure her misery. First, I went from my home in lower Cross Keys, across de Enoree, to see Maria. When I reached dar whar she stay, dey tell me dat her daughter over to Tosch. Done come and got her.

“A kind friend dat de Lawd put in my path fetched me back across de Enoree and over to Tosch to Maria’s gal’s house. I is gwine straight over dar and lay my hand on Maria and rid her of dat misery dat she sont word was ailing her all dis spring. Don’t make no diff’uns whar you hurts–woman, man or suckling babe–if you believes in de holler of my hand, it’ll ease you, allus do it. De Bible say so, dat’s why it be true. Ain’t gwine to tell you nothing but de truth and de whole truth, so help me Jesus. Gone 65 years, I is been born agin dat long; right over in Padgett’s Creek church, de white folks’ church, dat’s what de Lawd tuck my sins away and washed me clean agin wid His blood. Dat’s why I allus sticks to de truth, I does. …

“Sho I can remember when dey had de mustering grounds at de Keys. Dar day mustered and den dey turn’t in and practiced drilling dem soldiers till dey larn’t how to march and to shoot de Yankees. Drilling, dat’s de proper word, not practice, I knows, if I ain’t ed’icated. Dey signed me to go to de 16th regiment, but I never reached de North. When us got to Charleston, us turn’t around and de bosses fetched us right back to Union through Columbia. Us heard dat Sherman was coming, fetching fire along ‘hind him. …

“I can histronize de poor white folks’ wives and chilluns enduring de time of de Civil War fer you. When dese poor white men went to de war, dey left deir little chillun and deir wives in de hands of de darkies dat was kind and de rich wives of our marsters to care fer. Us took de best care of dem poor white dat us could under de circumstances dat prevailed.

“We was sont to Sullivan’s Island, but befo’ we reached it, de Yankees done got it and we won’t ‘lowed to cross in ’64. But jes’ de same, we was in service till dey give Capt. Franklin Bailey ‘mission to fetch us home. Dar we had to git ‘mission fer everything, jes’ as us niggers had to git ‘mission to leave our marster’s place at home in Union County. Capt. Bailey come on back to Cross Keys wid us under his protection, and we was under it fer de longest time atter we done got home. …

“I see a man in de courthouse dis morning, and he was like Nicodemus. Why dat man want to be resto’d back like he was when he was jest 21 years old. I seed him setting down dar in Mr. Perrin’s office, and I knowed his troubles when he ‘low dat he done been to every doctor in town. De trouble was, he never had no faith in de doctors and nobody else. How could he have faith in Jesus when he never had none in nothing else? Brother, you has to have faith in your fellowman befo’ you has faith in de Lawd. I don’t know how come, but dat’s de way it is. My plan is working by faith. Jesus say, ‘Work widout faith ain’t nothing; but work wid faith’ll move mountains’…

“Dey looks at de back of my head, and de hair on it ain’t rubbed against no college and fer dat reason dese young negroes don’t want me to preach. Dey wants to hear dat man preach dat can read. Man dat can read can’t understand less’n some divine man guide him. I speak as my Teacher gives it to me, dat’s de Lawd. In so doing, I testify de word dat no man can condemn. Dat is my plan of Salvation: to work by faith widout price or purse, as de Lawd, my Teacher has taught me.”

John Brown, 86 years old: Mixing

“My father was a ginger-bread colored man, not a full-blooded nigger. Dat’s how I is altogether yallow. See dat lady over dere in dat chair? Dat’s my wife. Her brighter skinned than I is. How come dat? Her daddy was a full-blooded Irishman. He come over here from Ireland and was overseer for Marse Bob Clowney. He took a fancy for Adeline’s mammy, a bright ‘latto gal slave on de place. White women in them days looked down on overseers as poor white trash. Him couldn’t git a white wife but made de best of it by puttin’ in his spare time a honeyin’ ’round Adeline’s mammy. Marse Bob stuck to him, and never ‘jected to it.

Sylvia Cannon, 85: A different Perspective

“Times was sho better long time ago den dey be now. I know it. Yes, mam, I here frettin myself to death after dem dat gone. Colored people never had no debt to pay in slavery time. Never hear tell bout no colored people been put in jail fore freedom. Had more to eat en more to wear den en had good clothes all de time cause white folks furnish everything, everything. Dat is, had plenty to eat such as we had. Had plenty peas en rice en hog meat en rabbit en’ fish en such as dat. Colored people sho fare better in slavery time be dat de white folks had to look out for dem. Had dey extra crop what dey had time off to work every Saturday. White folks tell dem what dey made, dey could have. Peoples would have found we colored people rich wid de money we made on de extra crop, if de slaves hadn’ never been set free. Us had big rolls of money en den when de Yankees come en change de money, dat what made us poor. It let de white people down en let us down too. Left us all to bout starve to death. Been force to go to de fish pond en de huckleberry patch. Land went down to $1.00 a acre. White people let us clear up new land en make us own money dat way. We bury it in de ground en dat how-come I had money. I dig mine up one day en had over $1500.00 dat I been save. Heap of peoples money down dere yet en dey don’ know whe’ to find it.”

EvX: Many slaves had cruel masters whom they disliked and left as quickly as possible. But many slaves also suffered–and died–of hunger, sickness, and exposure after the war. “We would have been rich if not for the war” sounds like wishful thinking, but Mrs. Cannon may have actually lost the money she’d been carefully saving up before the war.

Charlie Davis, 79 years old: Patrollers and Marriage

“De patrollers was nothin’ but poor white trash, mammy say, and if they didn’t whip some slaves, every now and then, they would lose deir jobs. My mammy and daddy got married after freedom, ’cause they didn’t git de time for a weddin’ befo’. They called deirselves man and wife a long time befo’ they was really married, and dat is de reason dat I’s as old as I is now. I reckon they was right, in de fust place, ’cause they never did want nobody else ‘cept each other, nohow. Here I is, I has been married one time and at no time has I ever seen another woman I wanted. My wife has been dead a long time and I is still livin’ alone.”

EvX: I haven’t been keeping track of how many people married vs. never married, but my general impression is that most people interviewed did marry and never parted from their spouse except in death. This is quite different from our modern situation, in which a rather large percentage of the black community never marries and instead carries on relationships with a number of other people. One theory holds that the modern Welfare State has disincentivised marriage by giving more money to unmarried women with children than to married women with children; another holds that high density–and ghettos and housing projects are definitely dense–interferes with our ability to form lasting pair bonds.

Slaves (and others) on J. J. Smith’s cotton plantation near Beaufort, South Carolina, photographed by Timothy O’Sullivan standing before their quarters in 1862

Welcome back to Anthropology Friday. Today we are continuing with Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States. (available on Amazon.) These stories were gathered in the 1930s as part of a Federally-funded program to get people working and preserve first-hand accounts of the history of the United States before everyone involved passed away.

William Ballard, 88, lived on a very extensive plantation:

“We was allowed three pounds o’ meat, one quart o’ molasses, grits and other things each week–plenty for us to eat.

“When freedom come, he told us we was free, and if we wanted to stay on with him, he would do the best he could for us. Most of us stayed, and after a few months, he paid wages. After eight months, some went to other places to work. …

“The master always had a very big garden with plenty of vegetables. He had fifty hogs, and I helped mind the hogs. He didn’t raise much cotton, but raised lots of wheat and corn. He made his own meal and flour from the mill on the creek; made home-made clothes with cards and spinning wheels. …

“The master had his own tanyard and tanned his leather and made shoes for his hands. … We had old brick ovens, lots of ’em. Some was used to make molasses from our own sugar cane we raised.

“The master had a ‘sick-house’ where he took sick slaves for treatment, and kept a drug store there. They didn’t use old-time cures much, like herbs and barks, except sassafras root tea for the blood. …

“My father run the blacksmith shop for the master on the place. I worked around the place. The patrollers were there and we had to have a pass to get out any. The nigger children sometimes played out in the road and were chased by patrollers. The children would run into the master’s place and the patrollers couldn’t get them ’cause the master wouldn’t let them. We had no churches for slaves, but went to the white church and set in the gallery. After freedom, niggers built ‘brush harbors’ on the place. …

Slaves on a South Carolina plantation (The Old Plantation, c. 1790)

“Some games children played was, hiding switches, marbles, and maybe others. Later on, some of de nigger boys started playing cards and got to gambling; some went to de woods to gamble.

“The old cotton gins on de farms were made of wooden screws, and it took all day to gin four bales o’ cotton.

“I was one of the first trustees that helped build the first colored folks’ church in the town of Greenwood.”

EvX: One thing that stands out to me, after reading a few dozen of these accounts, is these folks showed far more composure–sangfroid, if you will–about their lives than we tend to imagine we would.

It is very easy to imagine that you would act differently in a situation than others did–better, smarter, kinder, braver, whatever. Chances are, of course, that you’d be exactly like everyone else. So would I. And in most cases, people who grew up in slavery didn’t really have a very good idea of any alternative system, or how they would function (survive) in it.

This is part of why slave rebellions were so (relatively) rare in the US. You might think, “Slavery is awful and unjust, and in parts of the South there were more blacks than whites, so of course if I were a slave, I’d have helped start a successful rebellion.” But in reality, if you were a slave, there’s very little chance you’d be able to coordinate with other slaves, especially those on other plantations, much less convince them all to throw away the system that does feed them for the promise of an unknown system that might not feed them.

Even after slavery ended, plenty of slaves stayed where they were, not because they “liked” slavery, but because they didn’t have any immediate option of a better employer. Most of these folks left later when better opportunities arose.

Returning for a second to a popular (but under-discussed IMO) NRx topic, the whole point and importance of Exit is to allow citizens, like customers in a free market, to chose between countries, thus encouraging countries to treat their citizens well.

Large plantations were, like Medieval Manors, impressively self-contained, producing their own food, clothes, leather, timber, etc. A few people ran the place, keeping everything organized and making sure the finances worked out, and a thousand people did the actual labor.

Peter or Gordon, a whipped slave, photo taken at Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1863;

The downside to such a system is that there isn’t a whole lot to prevent the people running it from mistreating their slaves. In fact, the whole system is run on two different groups with two different sets of interests. The owners want to extract as much labor as possible from the slaves, and are perfectly willing to whip them to do so. They don’t want to kill their slaves, as slaves cost money, but they don’t care particularly much if their slaves are in pain and miserable.

The slaves, of course, want to do enough work to feed themselves and no more.

Freedom and Exit are essentially the same concept. Free slaves generally end up doing the same work they were doing before slavery, but now they can leave an cruel master and offer their labor to the best employers around. Obviously the terms an employee can demand have a lot to do with their individual skills and the local supply of labor, but at least employers are much less likely to whip them.

Anyway, continuing on…

Charley Barber, 81: The End of the World

“I stay on [at the plantation] ’til ’76. Then I come to Winnsboro and git a job as section hand laborer on de railroad. Out of de fust money … I buys me a red shirt and dat November I votes and de fust vote I put in de box was for Governor Wade Hampton.”

EvX: Another red shirt voting for Wade Hampton. I express my doubts. But back to Mr. Barber:

“Bless your soul Marse Wood, you know what old Mudder Shifton say? She ‘low dat: ‘In de year 1881, de world to an end will surely come’. I was twenty-five years old when all de niggers and most of de white folks was believin’ dat old lady and lookin’ for de world to come to an end in 1881. Dat was de year dat I jined de church, ’cause I wanted to make sure dat if de end did come, I’d be caught up in dat rapture.”

[Mother Shipton, a] 15th-century prophet was quoted as saying “The world to an end shall come, In eighteen hundred and eighty one” in a book published in 1862. In 1873 it was revealed to be a forgery; however, this did not stop some people from expecting the end.

Ursula Southeil (c. 1488–1561) … better known as Mother Shipton, is said to have been an Englishsoothsayer and prophetess. The first publication of her prophecies, which did not appear until 1641, eighty years after her reported death, contained a number of mainly regional predictions, but only two prophetic verses – neither of which foretold the End of the World, despite widespread assumptions to that effect.[4] …

The most famous claimed edition of Mother Shipton’s prophecies foretells many modern events and phenomena. Widely quoted today as if it were the original, it contains over a hundred prophetic rhymed couplets in notably non-16th-century language and includes the now-famous lines:

However, this version did not appear in print until 1862, and its true author, one Charles Hindley, subsequently admitted in print that he had invented it.[7] This invented prophecy has appeared over the years with different dates and in (or about) several countries (for example in the late 1970s many news articles about Mother Shipton appeared setting the date at 1981[citation needed]). The 1920s (subsequently much reprinted) booklet The Life and Prophecies of Ursula Sontheil better known as Mother Shipton[8] stated the date as 1991.[9][10]

“I b’longs to de St. John Methodist Church in Middlesix, part of Winnsboro. They was havin’ a rival (revival) meetin’ de night of de earthquake, last day of August, in 1886. Folks had hardly got over de scare of 1881, ’bout de world comin’ to an end. It was on Tuesday night, if I don’t disremember, ’bout 9 o’clock. De preacher was prayin’, just after de fust sermon, but him never got to de amen part of dat prayer. Dere come a noise or rumblin’, lak far off thunder, seem lak it come from de northwest, then de church begin to rock lak a baby’s cradle. Dere was great excitement. Old Aunt Melvina holler: ‘De world comin’ to de end’. De preacher say: ‘Oh, Lordy’, and run out of de pulpit. Everbody run out de church in de moonlight.

When de second quake come, ’bout a minute after de fust, somebody started up de cry: ‘De devil under de church! De devil under de church! De devil gwine to take de church on his back and run away wid de church!’ People never stop runnin’ ’til they got to de court house in town. Dere they ‘clare de devil done take St. John’s Church on his back and fly away to hell wid it. Marse Henry Galliard make a speech and tell them what it was and beg them to go home. Dat Mr. Skinner, de telegraph man at de depot, say de main part of it was way down ’bout Charleston, too far away for anybody to git hurt here, ‘less a brick from a chimney fall on somebody’s head. De niggers mostly believes what a fine man, lak Marse Henry, tell them. De crowd git quiet. Some of them go home but many of them, down in de low part of town, set on de railroad track in de moonlight, all night. I was mighty sleepy de nex’ mornin’ but I work on de railroad track just de same. Dat night folks come back to St. John’s Church, find it still dere, and such a outpourin’ of de spirit was had as never was had befo’ or since.”

EvX: I think people just plain believed in things more than they do now. I still blame electricity for the change.

Ed Barber, 77: Another Red Shirt!

“It’s been a long time since I see you. Maybe you has forgot but I ain’t forgot de fust time I put dese lookers on you, in ’76. Does you ‘members dat day? It was in a piece of pines beyond de Presbyterian Church, in Winnsboro, S. C. Us both had red shirts. You was a ridin’ a gray pony and I was a ridin’ a red mule, sorrel like. You say dat wasn’t ’76? Well, how come it wasn’t? Ouillah Harrison, another nigger, was dere, though he was a man. Both of us got to arguin’. He ‘low he could vote for Hampton and I couldn’t, ’cause I wasn’t 21. You say it was ’78 ‘stead of ’76, dat day in de pines when you was dere? Well! Well! I sho’ been thinkin’ all dis time it was ’76. …

“Who I see dere? Well, dere was a string of red shirts a mile long, dat come into Winnsboro from White Oak. And another from Flint Hill, over de Pea Ferry road, a mile long. De bar-rooms of de town did a big business dat day. Seem lak it was de fashion to git drunk all ‘long them days.

“Them red shirts was de monkey wrench in de cotton-gin of de carpet bag party. I’s here to tell you. If a nigger git hungry, all he have to do is go to de white folk’s house, beg for a red shirt, and explain hisself a democrat. He might not git de shirt right then but he git his belly full of everything de white folks got, and de privilege of comin’ to dat trough sometime agin. …

“My mother name Ann. Her b’long to my marster, James Barber. Dat’s not a fair question when you ask me who my daddy was. Well, just say he was a white man and dat my mother never did marry nobody, while he lived. I was de onliest child my mother ever had. …

“My marster, James Barber, went through de Civil War and died. I begs you, in de name of de good white folks of ’76 and Wade Hampton, not to forget me in dis old age pension business. …

“What I think of Abe Lincoln? I think he was a poor buckra white man, to de likes of me. Although, I ‘spects Mr. Lincoln meant well but I can’t help but wish him had continued splittin’ them fence rails, which they say he knowed all ’bout, and never took a hand in runnin’ de government of which he knowed nothin’ ’bout. Marse Jeff Davis was all right, but him oughta got out and fought some, lak General Lee, General Jackson and ‘Poleon Bonaparte.”

EvX: I suspect the Civil War might have gone a bit differently had Napoleon shown up on the battlefield, too.

“Does I know any good colored men? I sho’ does! Dere’s Professor Benjamin Russell at Blackstock. You knows him. Then dere was Ouillah Harrison, dat own a four-hoss team and a saddle hoss, in red shirt days. One time de brass band at Winnsboro, S. C. wanted to go to Camden, S. C. to play at de speakin’ of Hampton. He took de whole band from Winnsboro to Camden, dat day, free of charge. Ah! De way dat band did play all de way to Ridgeway, down de road to Longtown, cross de Camden Ferry, and right into de town. Dere was horns a blowin’, drums a beatin’, and people a shoutin’: ‘Hurrah for Hampton!’ Some was a singin’: ‘Hang Dan Chamberlain on a Sour Apple Tree’. Ouillah come home and found his wife had done had a boy baby. What you reckon? He name dat boy baby, Wade Hampton. When he come home to die, he lay his hand on dat boy’s head and say: ‘Wade, ‘member who you name for and always vote a straight out democrat ticket’. Which dat boy did!”

Anderson Bates, 87: Courtship, DuPont, and the Ku Kluxes

“Dat’s funny, you wants to set down dere ’bout my courtship and weddin’? Well, sir, I stay on de old plantation, work for my old marster, de doctor, and fell head over heels in love wid Carrie. Dere was seven more niggers a flyin’ ’round dat sugar lump of a gal in de night time when I breezes in and takes charge of de fireside cheer. I knocks one down one night, kick another out de nex’ night, and choke de stuffin’ out of one de nex’ night. I landed de three-leg stool on de head of de fourth one, de last time. Then de others carry deir ‘fections to some other place than Carrie’s house. Us have some hard words ’bout my bad manners, but I told her dat I couldn’t ‘trol my feelin’s wid them fools a settin’ ’round dere gigglin’ wid her. I go clean crazy! …

Slaves processing tobacco in 17th-century Virginia

“Then I go back to de quarry, drill and git out stone. They pay me $3.50 a day ’til de Parr Shoals Power come in wid ‘lectric power drills and I was cut down to eighty cents a day. Then I say: ‘Old grey hoss! Damn ‘lectric toolin’, I’s gwine to leave.’ I went to Hopewell, Virginia, and work wid de DuPonts for five years. War come on and they ask me to work on de acid area. De atmosphere dere tear all de skin off my face and arms, but I stuck it out to de end of de big war, for $7.20 a day. …

“Does I ‘member anything ’bout de Klu Kluxes? Jesus, yes! My old marster, de doctor, in goin’ ’round, say out loud to people dat Klu Kluxes was doin’ some things they ought not to do, by ‘stortin’ money out of niggers just ’cause they could.

“When he was gone to Union one day, a low-down pair of white men come, wid false faces, to de house and ask where Dick Bell was. Miss Nancy say her don’t know. They go hunt for him. Dick made a bee-line for de house. They pull out hoss pistols, fust time, ‘pow’. Dick run on, secon’ time, ‘pow’. Dick run on, third time, ‘pow’ and as Dick reach de front yard de ball from de third shot keel him over lak a hit rabbit. Old miss run out but they git him. Her say: ‘I give you five dollars to let him ‘lone.’ They say: ‘Not ‘nough.’ Her say: ‘I give you ten dollars.’ They say: ‘Not ‘nough.’ Her say: ‘I give you fifteen dollars.’ They say: ‘Not ‘nough.’ Her say: ‘I give you twenty-five dollars.’ They take de money and say: ‘Us’ll be back tomorrow for de other Dick.’ They mean Dick James.”

EvX: I never did figure out who Dick James and Dick Bell were.

“Nex’ day, us see them a comin’ again. Dick James done load up de shotgun wid buckshot. When they was comin’ up de front steps, Uncle Dick say to us all in de big house: ‘Git out de way!’ De names of de men us find out afterwards was Bishop and Fitzgerald. They come up de steps, wid Bishop in de front. Uncle Dick open de door, slap dat gun to his shoulder, and pull de trigger. Dat man Bishop hollers: ‘Oh Lordy.’ He drop dead and lay dere ’til de coroner come. Fitzgerald leap ‘way. They bring Dick to jail, try him right in dat court house over yonder. What did they do wid him? Well, when Marse Bill Stanton, Marse Elisha Ragsdale and Miss Nancy tell ’bout it all from de beginnin’ to de end, de judge tell de jury men dat Dick had a right to protect his home, and hisself, and to kill dat white man and to turn him loose. Dat was de end of de Klu Kluxes in Fairfield.”

I’ve been selecting excerpts that I personally find interesting. I’m not trying to paint the big picture of slavery nor highlighting awful things like whippings (there are many other places you can find those accounts.) Just because they’re not here doesn’t mean I’m pretending they aren’t in the accounts–I just assume you already know about them.

Frances Andrews, 83: The Skeleton

“It is said that the old brick house where the Wallaces lived was built by a Eichleberger, but Dr. John Simpson lived there and sold it to Mr. Wallace. In the attic was an old skeleton which the children thought bewitched the house. None of them would go upstairs by themselves. I suppose old Dr. Simpson left it there. Sometimes later, it was taken out
and buried.”

EvX: ??? Who keeps a (presumably real) skeleton in their attic? Did someone die up there and no one bothered to remove the body until it had completely decayed? Or was it a medical skeleton? That is seriously creepy.

Josephine Bacchus, about 75-80 years old: Earthquake and Folk Medicine

“Yes, mam, dey was glad to have a heap of colored people bout dem cause white folks couldn’ work den no more den dey can work dese days like de colored people can. Reckon dey love to have dey niggers back yonder just like dey loves to have dem dese days to do what dey ain’ been cut out to do.” …

“Lord, I sho remembers dat earth shake good as anything. When it come on me, I was settin down wid my foots in a tub of water. Yes, my Lord, I been had a age on me in de shake. I remember, dere been such a shakin dat evenin, it made all de people feel mighty queer like. It just come in a tremble en first thing I know, I felt de difference in de crack of de house. I run to my sister Jessie cause she had been live in New York en she was well acquainted wid dat kind of gwine on. She say, ‘Josie, dis ain’ nothin but dem shake I been tellin you bout, but dis de first time it come here en you better be a prayin.’ En, honey, everything white en colored was emptied out of doors dat night. Lord, dey was scared. Great Jeruseleum! De people was scared everywhe’. Didn’ nobody know what to make of it. I tellin you, I betcha I was 30 years old in de shake.”

Charleston, South Carolina, post-earthquake

EvX: Given that this narrative was collected in South Carolina, and… *adds up the years* I assume this was the 1886 Charleston Earthquake:

“Oh, de people never didn’ put much faith to de doctors in dem days. Mostly, dey would use de herbs in de fields for dey medicine. Dere two herbs, I hear talk of. Dey was black snake root en Sampson snake root. Say, if a person never had a good appetite, dey would boil some of dat stuff en mix it wid a little whiskey en rock candy en dat would sho give dem a sharp appetite. See, it natural cause if you take a tablespoon of dat bitter medicine three times a day like a person tell you, it bound to swell your appetite. Yes, mam, I know dat a mighty good mixture.”

EvX: It turns out that Black Snakeroot is a real plant, more commonly known as black cohosh. According to Wikipedia:

Native Americans used black cohosh to treat gynecological and other disorders, including sore throats, kidney problems, and depression.[3] Following the arrival of European settlers in the U.S. who continued the medicinal usage of black cohosh, the plant appeared in the U.S. Pharmacopoeia in 1830 under the name “black snakeroot”. In 1844 A. racemosa gained popularity when John King, an eclectic physician, used it to treat rheumatism and nervous disorders. Other eclectic physicians of the mid-nineteenth century used black cohosh for a variety of maladies, including endometritis, amenorrhea, dysmenorrhea, menorrhagia, sterility, severe after-birth pains, and for increased breast milk production.[6] …

Black cohosh is used today mainly as a dietary supplement marketed to women as remedies for the symptoms of premenstrual tension, menopause and other gynecological problems.[3] Recent meta-analysis of contemporary evidence supports these claims,[1] although the Cochrane Collaboration has concluded that there is insufficient evidence to support its use for menopausal symptoms.[7] Study design and dosage of black cohosh preparations play a role in clinical outcome,[8] and recent investigations with pure compounds found in black cohosh have identified some beneficial effects of these compounds on physiological pathways underlying age-related disorders like osteoporosis.[9]

However, you should note:

No studies exist on long-term safety of black cohosh use in humans.[13] In a transgenic mouse model of cancer, black cohosh did not increase incidence of primary breast cancer, but increased metastasis of pre-existing breast cancer to the lungs.[14]

Eastman Johnson’s A Ride for Liberty: the Fugitive Slaves

Please don’t just go eating plants from a random field or ordered off some website without being absolutely sure they’re actually safe.

Sampson snake root is also a real plant, otherwise known as Orbexilum pedunculatum. According to the internet, which I am sure would never lie to me:

“Oh, my Lord, child, de people was sho wiser in olden times den what dey be now. Dey been have all kind of signs to forecast de times wid en dey been mighty true to de word, too. Say, when you hear a cow low en cry so mournful like, it ain’ gwine be long fore you hear tell of a death.”

“Den dere one bout de rain. Say, sometimes de old rain crow stays in de air en hollers en if you don’ look right sharp, it gwine rain soon. Call him de rain crow. He hollers mostly like dis, ‘Goo-oop, goo-oop.’ Like dat.”

“De people used to have a bird for cold weather, too. Folks say, ‘Don’ you hear dat cold bird? Look out, it gwine be cold tomorrow.’ De cold bird, he a brown bird. If you can see him, he a fine lookin bird, too. Yes’um, right large en strong lookin, but don’ nobody hardly ever see
him dese days.”

“En I reckon you hear talk bout dis one. Say, not to wash on de first day of de New Year cause if you do, you will wash some of your family out de pot. Say, somebody will sho die. Dat right, too. Den if possible, must boil some old peas on de first day of de New Year en must cook some hog jowl in de pot wid dem. Must eat some of it, but don’ be obliged to eat it all.”

Most Southerners will tell you that it dates back to the Civil War. Black-eyed peas were considered animal food (like purple hull peas).

The peas were not worthy of General Sherman’s Union troops. When Union soldiers raided the Confederates food supplies, legend says they took everything except the peas and salted pork. The Confederates considered themselves lucky to be left with those meager supplies, and survived the winter. Peas became symbolic of luck. …

(“Most” here is probably an exaggeration.)

One explanation of the superstition says that black-eyed peas were all the southern slaves had to celebrate with on the first day of January, 1863. What were they celebrating? That was the day when the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect. …

The oldest explanation for this tradition I found is on Wikipedia. According to Wikipedia, the tradition dates as far ancient Egypt. During the time of the Pharaohs, it was believed that eating a meager food like black-eyed peas showed humility before the gods, and you would be blessed. According to Wikipedia, the Babylonian Talmud, which dates to 339 CE, instructs the faithful Jews to eat black-eyed peas at Rosh Hashana.

Well, since it is still January, if you haven’t had your black-eyed peas yet, perhaps there’s still time to cook up a pot and enjoy what might be a very old tradition.

I have been intending to read these narratives for several years, ever since I spotted them on Amazon (though I don’t suspect I’ll get through all 10,000 pages of them.) Many of the accounts are set down in dialect, which I gather was more common in writing in the 30s than it is today, we moderns having decided that dialect is “insulting” or something, though the truth is I think some people just find it difficult to read. I have always loved dialect, ever since I was very young, so you are getting these dialect and all. After all, every single person on earth speaks with an accent to someone else’s ears.

With so many pages of material, debated with myself about what I should excerpt, and eventually decided to just go with whatever I found interesting, especially the parts I found compelling enough to read out loud to others.

As usual, I’ll be using “” instead of blockquotes for readability.

M. E. Abrams: Secret BBQs, Spirits, and the Conjurin’ Doctor

“Marse Glenn had 64 slaves. On Sat’day night, de darkies would have a little fun on de side. A way off from de big house, down in de pastur’ dar wuz about de bigges’ gully what I is ebber seed. Dat wuz de place whar us collected mos’ ev’ry Sa’day night fer our lil’ mite o’ fun frum de white folks hearin’. Sometime it wuz so dark dat you could not see de fingers on yo’ han’ when you would raise it fo’ your face. … De pastur’ wuz big and de trees made dark spots in it on de brightest nights. … When us started together, look like us would git parted ‘fo we reach de gully all together. One of us see som’tin and take to runnin’. Maybe de other darkies in de drove, de wouldn’t see nothin’ jes den. Dats zactly how it is wid de spirits. De mout (might) sho de’self to you and not to me. De acts raal queer all de way round. Dey can take a notion to scare de daylights outtin you when you is wid a gang; or dey kin scare de whole gang; den, on de other hand, dey kin sho de’self off to jes two or three. …

“Never mindin’ all o’ dat, we n’used to steal our hog ever’ sa’day night and take off to de gully whar us’d git him dressed and barbecued. Niggers has de mos’es fun at a barbecue dat dare is to be had. As none o’ our gang didn’t have no ‘ligion, us never felt no scruples bout not gettin de ‘cue’ ready fo’ Sunday. Us’d git back to de big house along in de evenin’ o’ Sunday. Den Marse, he come out in de yard an’ low whar wuz you niggers dis mornin’. How come de chilluns had to do de work round here. Us would tell some lie bout gwine to a church ‘siety meetin’. But we got raal scairt and mose ‘cided dat de best plan wuz to do away wid de barbecue in de holler. Conjin ‘Doc.’ say dat he done put a spell on ole Marse so dat he wuz ‘blevin ev’y think dat us tole him bout Sa’day night and Sunday morning. Dat give our minds ‘lief; but it turned out dat in a few weeks de Marse come out from under de spell. Doc never even knowed nothin’ bout it. Marse had done got to countin’ his hogs ever’ week. When he cotch us, us wuz all punished wid a hard long task. Dat cured me o’ believing in any conjuring an’ charmin’ but I still kno’s dat dare is haints; kaise ever time you goes to dat gully at night, up to dis very day, you ken hear hogs still gruntin’ in it, but you can’t see nothing.

EvX: So then the Master died and some other people came to live in the plantation house and then it got a reputation for being haunted…

“Den Marse Glenn’s boys put Mammy in de house to keep it fer ’em. But Lawd God! Mammy said dat de furs night she stayed dare de haints nebber let her git not narr’y mite o’ sleep. … Mammy low dat it de Marse a lookin’ fer his money what he done tuck and burried and de boys couldn’t find no sign o’ it. Atter dat, de sons tuck an’ tacked a sign on de front gate, offering $200.00 to de man, white or black, dat would stay dar and fin’ out whar dat money wuz burried. Our preacher, the Rev. Wallace, lowed dat he would stay dar and find out whar dat money wuz from de spirits. …

“He went to bed. A dog began running down dem steps; and a black cat run across de room dat turned to white befo’ it run into de wall. Den a pair of white horses come down de stairway a rattling chains fer harness. Next a woman dressed in white come in dat room. Brother Wallace up and lit out dat house and he never went back no mo’.

“Another preacher tried stayin’ dar. He said he gwine to keep his head kivered plum up. Some’tin unkivered it and he seed a white goat a grinnin’ at him. But as he wuz a brave man and trus’ de Lawd, he lowed, ‘What you want wid me nohow?’ The goat said, ‘what is you doin’ here. Raise, I knows dat you ain’t sleep.’ De preacher say, ‘I wants you to tell me what ole Marse don tuck and hid dat money?’ De goat grin and low, ‘How come you don’ look under your pillar, sometime?’ Den he run away. De preacher hopped up and looked under de pillar, and dar wuz de money sho nuf.”

Ezra Adams, 82 years old, reminds us that many former slaves died of hunger, disease, or exposure in the aftermath of the Civil War:

“De slaves, where I lived, knowed after de war dat they had abundance of dat somethin’ called freedom, what they could not wat, wear, and sleep in. Yes, sir, they soon found out dat freedom ain’t nothin’, ‘less you is got somethin’ to live on and a place to call home. … It sho’ don’t hold good when you has to work, or when you gits hongry. You knows dat poor white folks and niggers has got to work to live, regardless of liberty, love, and all them things. I believes a person loves more better, when they feels good. I knows from experience dat poor folks feels better when they has food in deir frame and a few dimes to jingle in deir pockets. …

“If a poor man wants to enjoy a little freedom, let him go on de farm and work for hisself. It is sho’ worth somethin’ to be boss, and, on de farm you can be boss all you want to, ‘less de man ‘low his wife to hold dat ‘portant post. A man wid a good wife, one dat pulls wid him, can see and feel some pleasure and experience some independence. But, bless your soul, if he gits a woman what wants to be both husband and wife, fare-you-well and good-bye, too, to all love, pleasure, and independence; ’cause you sho’ is gwine to ketch hell here and no mild climate whenever you goes ‘way.

James Hopkinson’s Plantation. Planting sweet potatoes. ca. 1862/63

Victoria Adams, 90 years old: Medicine and the Yankees

“Us had medicine made from herbs, leaves and roots; some of them was cat-nip, garlic root, tansy, and roots of burdock. De roots of burdock soaked in whiskey was mighty good medicine. We dipped asafetida in turpentine and hung it ’round our necks to keep off disease.

“Befo’ de Yankees come thru, our peoples had let loose a lot of our hosses and de hosses strayed over to de Yankee side, and de Yankee men rode de hosses back over to our plantation. De Yankees asked us if we want to be free. I never say I did; I tell them I want to stay wid my missus and they went on and let me alone. They ‘stroyed most everything we had ‘cept a little vittles; took all de stock and take them wid them. They burned all de buildings ‘cept de one de massa and missus was livin’ in.

“It wasn’t long after de Yankees went thru dat our missus told us dat we don’t b’long to her and de massa no more. None of us left dat season. I got married de next year and left her. I like being free more better.”

Uncle Marian, a slave of great notoriety, of North Carolina. Daguerreotype, circa 1850.

EvX: Many slaves opted to stay where they were immediately after freedom, trusting the plantations they knew to the threat of hunger and homelessness in a war-ravaged land, but moved on later as opportunities arose.

Whether slaves stayed or left had a lot to do with how cruel their masters were–the crueler the master, the more likely their slaves were to leave as fast as possible. Unfortunately, given the misery and starvation induced by the war, these same people were probably less likely to survive long enough to give the folklorists their accounts. Obviously this may create a numerical bias in the accounts.

Frank Adamson, 82 years old: The Rattler and the Red Shirts

“I ‘members when you was barefoot at de bottom; now I see you a settin’ dere, gittin’ bare at de top, as bare as de palm of my hand.”

[EvX: In case it isn’t clear, “you” here is the person conducting the interview.]

“I’s been ‘possum huntin’ wid your pappy, when he lived on de Wateree, just after de war. One night us got into tribulation, I tells you! ‘Twas ’bout midnight when de dogs make a tree. Your pappy climb up de tree, git ’bout halfway up, heard sumpin’ dat once you hears it you never forgits, and dats de rattlin’ of de rattles on a rattle snake’s tail. Us both ‘stinctly hear dat sound! What us do? Me on de ground, him up de tree, but where de snake? Dat was de misery, us didn’t know. Dat snake give us fair warnin’ though! Marster Sam (dats your pa) ‘low: ‘Frank, ease down on de ground; I’ll just stay up here for a while.’ I lay on them leaves, skeered to make a russle. Your pa up de tree skeered to go up or down! Broad daylight didn’t move us. Sun come up, he look all ’round from his vantage up de tree, then come down, not ’til then, do I gits on my foots.

“Then I laugh and laugh and laugh, and ask Marster Sam how he felt. Marster Sam kinda frown and say: ‘Damn I feels like hell! Git up dat tree! Don’t you see dat ‘possum up dere?’ I say: ‘But where de snake, Marster?’ He say: ‘Dat rattler done gone home, where me and you and dat ‘possum gonna be pretty soon!’ …

“I’s as close to white folks then as peas in a pod. Wore de red shirt and drunk a heap of brandy in Columbia, dat time us went down to General Hampton into power. I ‘clare I hollered so loud goin’ ‘long in de procession, dat a nice white lady run out one of de houses down dere in Columbia, give me two biscuits and a drum stick of chicken, patted me on de shoulder, and say: ‘Thank God for all de big black men dat can holler for Governor Hampton as loud as dis one does.’ Then I hollers some more for to please dat lady, though I had to take de half chawed chicken out dis old mouth, and she laugh ’bout dat ’til she cried. She did!

“Well, I’ll be rockin’ ‘long balance of dese days, a hollerin’ for Mr. Roosevelt, just as loud as I holler then for Hampton.

Four generations of a slave family, Smith’s Plantation, Beaufort, South Carolina, 1862

EvX: These interviews were conducted in the 30s, so that’s the second Roosevelt.

As Wikipedia points out, the fact that the interviewers were white may also have affected the particular anecdotes informants chose to share or how they framed them. In this case, I wonder if the account is even true. Wikipedia claims:

While sometimes engaging in violence, the Red Shirts, the White League, rifle clubs, and similar groups in the late nineteenth century worked openly and were better organized than the secret vigilante groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. Their goals were to use violence and terrorism to restore the Democrats to power and repress the exercise of civil and voting rights by the freedmen.[5] During the 1876, 1898 and 1900 campaigns in North Carolina, the Red Shirts played prominent roles in intimidating non-Democratic Party voters. …

According to E. Merton Coulter in The South During Reconstruction (1947), the red shirt was adopted in Mississippi in 1875 by “southern brigadiers” of the Democratic Party who were opposed to black Republicans. The Red Shirts disrupted Republican rallies, intimidated or assassinated black leaders, and discouraged and suppressed black voting at the polls. …

State Democrats organized parades and rallies in every county of South Carolina. Many of the participants were armed and mounted; all wore red. Mounted men gave an impression of greater numbers. When Wade Hampton and other Democrats spoke, the Red Shirts would respond enthusiastically, shouting the campaign slogan, “Hurrah for Hampton.” …

In the Piedmont counties of Aiken, Edgefield, and Barnwell, freedmen who voted were driven from their homes and whipped, while some of their leaders were murdered. During the 1876 presidential election, Democrats in Edgefield and Laurens counties voted “early and often”, while freedmen were barred from the polls.[7] …

Few freedmen voted for Hampton, and most remained loyal to the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln. The 1876 campaign was the “most tumultuous in South Carolina’s history.”[8] “An anti-Reconstruction historian later estimated that 150 Negroes were murdered in South Carolina during the campaign.”[9]

After the election on November 7, a protracted dispute between Chamberlain and Hampton ensued as both claimed victory. Because of the massive election fraud, Edmund William McGregor Mackey, a Republican member of the South Carolina House of Representatives, called upon the “Hunkidori Club” from Charleston to eject Democratic members from Edgefield and Laurens counties from the House. Word spread through the state. By December 3, approximately 5,000 Red Shirts assembled at the State House to defend the Democrats. Hampton appealed for calm and the Red Shirts dispersed.

As a result of a national political compromise, President Rutherford B. Hayes ordered the removal of the Union Army from the state on April 3, 1877. The white Democrats completed their political takeover of South Carolina.

Graph of the enslaved population of the United States as a percentage of the population of each state, 1790–1860

They were active in other states, too, but you get the idea.

Red is a common color, and soon appears again in Democrat lore, as Huber recounts in “Red Necks and Red Bandanas: Appalachian Coal Miners and the Coloring of Union Identity, 1912-1936″ (published 2006):

“They shot one of those Bolsheviks up in Knox County this morning. Harry Sims his name was…. That deputy knew his business. He didn’t give the redneck a chance to talk, he just plugged him in the stomach…” So Malcolm Cowley, writing in The New Republic in 1932, recounted a local coal operator’s response to the murder of a nineteen-year-old Young Communist League union organizer in eastern Kentucky… The contempt and ruthlessness in this comment will scarcely surprise readers familiar with the history of the violent, bloody suppression of the American labor movement, but seeing the pejorative terms Bolshevik and redneck used interchangeably may. For more than a century, the epithet redneck has chiefly denigrated rural, poor white southerners…. During the 1920s and 1930s, however, another one of its definitions in the northern and central Appalachian coalfields was “a Communist.”

Coal miners displaying a bomb that was dropped during the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921

During the Appalachian coal mine wars–which was a real thing that actually happened, though obviously it wasn’t actually on the scale of a real war–strikers often wore red bandanas around their necks.

The term characterized farmers having a red neck caused by sunburn from hours working in the fields. …

By 1900, “rednecks” was in common use to designate the political factions inside the Democratic Party comprising poor white farmers in the South.[14] … A newspaper notice in Mississippi in August 1891 called on rednecks to rally at the polls at the upcoming primary election:[15]

Primary on the 25th.
And the “rednecks” will be there.
And the “Yaller-heels” will be there, also.
And the “hayseeds” and “gray dillers,” they’ll be there, too.
And the “subordinates” and “subalterns” will be there to rebuke their slanderers and traducers.
And the men who pay ten, twenty, thirty, etc. etc. per cent on borrowed money will be on hand, and they’ll remember it, too.

By 1910, the political supporters of the Mississippi Democratic Party politician James K. Vardaman—chiefly poor white farmers—began to describe themselves proudly as “rednecks,” even to the point of wearing red neckerchiefs to political rallies and picnics.[16] …

The term “redneck” in the early 20th century was occasionally used in reference to American coal miner union members who wore red bandannas for solidarity. The sense of “a union man” dates at least to the 1910s and was especially popular during the 1920s and 1930s in the coal-producing regions of West Virginia, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania.[18]

The strikers, IIRC, were multi-ethnic, not just whites.

The path of the Democratic party from “anti Northerners” to “anti rich industrial capitalists” to “anti Southerners” is really interesting–Democrats haven’t won a majority of the white vote in a presidential election since LBJ made them the part of the Civil Rights Act.

It’s like they’re always red, but the meaning of “red” keeps changing.

Mass migrations have probably been among the great selective events of human history. The Ostsiedlung, for example, selected for German citizens who were well-disciplined, hard working, good planners, and probably quick to defend their land holdings from others. Overall, Germans descended from the folks who participated in the Ostsiedlung appear to be more likely to join or vote for far-right political parties, be Neo-Nazis, or otherwise engage in “far right subcultures.”

“The Whites in the U.S. have a much higher TFR than most any European country. As well, Europeans overall are much further to the Left than Americans. I became interested in this when I noted that most of the ethnic groups of Americans—particularly the ones away from urban areas—seem far more to the Right than their brethren in the Old Countries. …

“Particularly interesting is the conservative nature of huge swaths of the Midwest and the Upper Plains/Mountain West. These places, while receiving some settlers ultimately originating from the Anglo-Scottish border regions and other Scotch-Irish (the same people who settled Appalachia), are also suffused with large numbers of other Europeans, such Germans and Scandinavians, people who today aren’t exactly known to be raving right-wingers. …

“Liberals are concentrated in old-colonial states, in places without much space to expand into. The reddest states on the other hand are areas with wide open stretches of land. … We can see what by looking the fertility rates of liberal (and sparsely populated) northern New England. The U.S. states of Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire have plenty of land and low land values, but aren’t very fecund. … The population in upper New England is largely composed of the original colonial stock; they lost their fast-breeding inklings long ago…”

Jay hypothesizes that the cities produce liberals, ie,

“Liberal-minded people (and by extension, slow-breeders in general, when Eastern Europe and East Asia are also considered) descend from people who have stayed put for generations—or at the very least, never moved into previously empty lands. Under such conditions—which, prior to industrialization was Malthusian—rapid breeders were not favored. Rather efficient competitors—those who maximize their resources before starting a family—were selected for.”

And that the countryside produces conservatives, ie,

“The early colonist came and spread across the land very quickly, easily displacing the earlier inhabitants. … The rapid increase of a population when it moves into an area that it did not previously inhabit sounds like a great opportunity for evolution by natural selection to work its magic.

“When new land is abundant, and “family formation” is relatively easy, which types of individuals are selected for? Yup, those who married young and had lots of children (the fairly harsh and physically demanding nature of the American frontier ensured that paternal investment needed to remain high, such that stable marriage was important). In short, people who are “family oriented” are selected for.”

I propose a complementary hypothesis:

Migration is more appealing to conservatives than to liberals, so major migrations result in conservatives self-sorting into frontier areas, while liberals are left behind.

Further, this sorting event may trigger a “run away” effect: as people find themselves in an environment that seems increasingly liberal (or conservative,) due to all of the conservatives (or liberals) leaving, they shift their own political opinions to better agree with the consensus or perhaps maintain their own self image as more liberal than others, leading the group to shift increasingly liberal (or conservative.)

Notice an inconsistency in Jay’s theory that he himself admits: low fertility in rural Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire. If open land itself selects for higher fertility, then even a population whose ancestors were liberals ought, over time, to become more fecund. But if the conservatives have simply left these areas for Kansas, leaving the liberals behind, then we might expect to find liberals in Maine and conservatives in Kansas.

Likewise, colonization of the US may have involved the more conservative elements migrating from Europe to the US, leaving behind a more liberal Europe compared to the new colonies. Since this is a post that’s ultimately supposed to be about the Civil War, let’s use slavery as an example issue.

France abolished slavery in its overseas colonies in 1794 (it had been illegal in mainland France since the 1300s,) though this was violently opposed by the colonists and slavery was re-instituted until 1848, (Haiti obviously excepted.)

In 1783, the British began agitating against slavery; by 1799, Britain abolished the enslavement of Scottish coal miners and salters. (An act passed in 1606 had enslaved them.) The slave trade was abolished in 1807, and in 1833, slavery was formally abolished throughout their empire.

Spain, (a major colonizer earlier than Britain or France,) attempted to outlaw slavery in its colonies in 1542, but this was never enforced throughout most of their territory due to colonialist opposition. Slavery was eventually abolished throughout most of Latin America during the 1810-1820s Independence Wars, but it persisted for a few decades more in a few places, and wasn’t abolished until 1873 in Puerto Rico, 1886 in Cuba, and 1888 in Brazil. (Brazil wasn’t a Spanish colony, of course.)

On to the US!

It’s no secret that the bulk New England’s colonists happened to be more liberal than the bulk of the South’s, and by 1804, slavery was illegal throughout the North. This may overstate the North’s position, however, as the anti-slavery laws came only gradually into effect.

While slavery remained legal in the South until 1865 (and who knows how long it would have stayed legal had the North not intervened,) many Southerners had begun voluntarily freeing their slaves. By 1810, Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware had substantial freedman populations, with Delaware in the lead with 75% of their slaves free. Estimates of the total number of free blacks on the eve of the Civil War vary from 488 thousand (or 11% of the total black population of the US,) to 1.5 million (or 34%). (I suspect the discrepancy is due to different definitions of “free.”)

I have heard some speculation that, had the North not intervened, the South would have eventually given up slavery on its own, much like Brazil. Certainly this fits with the generalized pattern across the Western world, but I have no evidence at my disposal to support (or contradict) the idea.

Regardless, I do know that the attitude in the North toward abolitionism changed radically between 1800 and 1860.

In the early 1800s, Northern views on the abolitionists in their midst ranged from “Kind of weird” to “Kill them with fire,” as graphically illustrated by the time white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison was nearly murdered by an angry mob in Boston, MA:

“In the fall of 1835, a mob of several thousand surrounded the building housing Boston’s anti-slavery offices, where Garrison had agreed to address a meeting of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society after the fiery British abolitionist George Thompson was unable to keep his engagement with them. The mayor and police persuaded the women to leave the building, but when the mob learned that Thompson was not within, it began yelling for Garrison with cries for his lynching or tar and feathering. The mayor managed to sneak Garrison and an assistant out a window, but the mob pursued, captured him, tied a rope around his waist, and dragged him through the streets of Boston. The sheriff rescued Garrison from lynching by arresting him and taking him to the Leverett Street Jail for his own protection.” (Wikipedia.)

By the late 1850s, private citizens in the North were raising money to fund John Brown’s eventual bloody raid on Harper’s Ferry; by 1861, the North collectively decided it was worth killing at least 260,000 Southerners (the vast majority of whom did not even own slaves) and sacrificing at least 365,000 of their own people to end slavery in the South. Estimates of total Civil War deaths range from 625,000–850,000, in exchange for the freedom of 3 to 4 million people.

And by 1870, African Americans were given the right to vote.

Other than the printing press, what caused this radical shift in attitudes?

The other big thing going on in America at the time was Westward Expansion.

Between 1607 and 1776, Americans didn’t even settle the entirety of of the 13 Colonies:

Zone of American settlement circa 1776

The western portions of New York, Pennsylvania, Georgia, etc., were still under Indian control. But with the end of British control, settlement expanded rapidly. A mere 55 years later, the territory had more than doubled:

Zone of American settlement circa 1820

By 1822, Americans were swarming into Mexico, soon to be known as Texas.

“Hoping that more settlers would reduce the near-constant Comanche raids, Mexican Texasliberalized its immigration policies to permit immigrants from outside Mexico and Spain.[74] Under the Mexican immigration system, large swathes of land were allotted to empresarios, who recruited settlers from the United States, Europe, and the Mexican interior. The first grant, to Moses Austin, was passed to his son Stephen F. Austin after his death.

“Austin’s settlers, the Old Three Hundred, made places along the Brazos River in 1822.[75] Twenty-three other empresarios brought settlers to the state, the majority of whom were from the United States.[75][76] The population of Texas grew rapidly. In 1825, Texas had about 3,500 people, with most of Mexican descent.[77] By 1834, the population had grown to about 37,800 people, with only 7,800 of Mexican descent.[78]” (Emphasis added)

In 1830, Mexico attempted to halt American immigration to Texas; in 1835, the Texicans revolted. California also began receiving American settlers in the 1820s, and quickly followed a similar path.

Zone of American settlement circa 1835

By 1848, Mexico had lost half its territory to the US, officially opening up almost the entire continental US to American settlement. By 1861, California Oregon, Texas, and Kansas had become official states, not just territories:

American states in 1861

Let’s take a closer look at this map.

Red = States that seceded before April 15, 1861

Light Red = States that seceded after April 15, 1861

Yellow = States that stayed in the Union, even though they permitted slavery

Blue = Union states where slavery was illegal.

I don’t know what’s up with Kentucky, but Missouri had significant populations of both Southerners and Northerners. Maryland and Delaware, as we’ve discussed, were already well on their way toward ending slavery when the war broke out, and were basically occupied by Union troops, anyway, due to their proximity to DC.

The difficulty of this sort of map is that it only shows the territorial borders of the states, rather than the population densities; parts of West Texas today probably have a lower population density than many parts of the non-state territories on this map. Regardless, the nation had expanded quite a bit in the <100 years since independence, and seems to have been expanding faster in the North than in the South.

At the same time as Northerners were leaving the coast in droves, more immigrants, eg Irish and Germans, were arriving from Europe. The Germans were particularly selected for liberalness, being the losers of the 1848 rebellions against the German government; Thomas Edison’s father was a refugee from a failed Canadian independence bid.

In sum, I propose that Westward Migration in the 1800s drew disproportionately from the East Coast’s more conservative folks–the guys most likely to drag an abolitionist through the streets and tar and feather him–thus leaving behind a population of more liberal folks. This caused a radical shift in the ideas being discussed in the North as there were simply fewer pro-slavery arguments to be heard, and public consensus therefore shifted suddenly leftward.

“But wait,” I hear you saying, “Didn’t the South expand Westward, too? Why didn’t that cause the South to go liberal?”

A few factors:

The South started out more conservative than the North, so even if it did become more liberal over time, it still would not have become as liberal as the North.

The South probably received fewer liberal Germans and Canadians, though don’t cite me on that because I know a lot of Germans settled in Texas.

The South is really inhospitable, especially to whites:

Take a good look. Houston is on the same latitude as Cairo. North Carolina is at the same latitude as Tunisia. Florida is down by Western Sahara. Even Washington, DC, is only at the latitude of Spain, southern Italy, Greece, and Turkey.

Most Southerners hail from places too far north to even show up on this map. To get to London,’s latitude, you’d have to go to the northern tip of Newfoundland, Canada. For Scotland, you’d have to go to Labrador.

Whites did not thrive in the South. It was really hot, swampy, and full of diseases they had no immunity to, like Malaria and Yellow Fever, which arrived with the African slaves and quickly spread. The population was suffering widespread malnutrition due to inadequate, improperly prepared food and parasites like Necator Americanus, “American Killer”, aka hookworms, which also came over with the slaves. When people finally figured out what was causing all the anemia and began eradicating hookworms, they discovered that about 40% of Southern children were infected.

Since these diseases were endemic to Africa, their effect on the black population was less devastating; it’s no wonder that the Scottish and Scotch-Irish settlers in the South migrated up into the cooler regions of the Appalachians and stayed there, leaving the low-lying areas open for black settlement.

As a result, the Southern economy and population grew very slowly, especially compared to the North. It has only been since the invention of air conditioning that much of the South has become remotely inhabitable by whites; Houston, Texas, would be nothing but a speck of dust on the map if it weren’t for AC.

The North, by contrast, had an abundance of land at its disposal that wasn’t riddled with malaria-infested swamps, and so could expand quickly.

So not only was the South not expanding as quickly as the North, Southern whites really did see themselves as at a biological disadvantage to blacks, who did not suffer as much from the Southern diseases and heat.

4. As a result, obviously, the Southern economy was actually more tied up in slavery than the Northern economy, where it had never been as big a factor and the long winters gave the environmental upper hand more to whites, and it is obviously going to take longer for attitudes to shift in a place where eliminating slavery going to be a big deal than in a place were there weren’t a whole lot of slaves to start with.

So environmental factors basically colluded to dampen an effects of Western migration in the South while the North expanded freely, leading to an acceleration in political changes in the Northern cities, resulting in a sudden willingness to go to war over the issue.